In the Key of Carrot - Linsey Pollak

Celebrating Australian music month, a multi-faceted audio and video portrait of Linsey Pollak, Queensland-based musician, instrument-maker, composer, musical director and community music facilitator.

Linsey Pollak is a vibrant and original music practitioner whose approach is a sharp contrast to traditional performance on the concert stage. Demystifying music and inviting community participation, he's traversed the country as musician-in-residence in communities from Hobart to Broome. He established Perth's Ethnic Music Centre in the early eighties, has been director and composer for companies including Doppio Teatro and Dance North, has performed at most major festivals around Australia, and recorded 25 albums with various groups.

As an instrument-maker, Linsey has designed a number of new wind instruments. While studying Macedonian bagpipes on the ground in Macedonia, he developed a passion for playing and making woodwind instruments from Eastern Europe, and also designs marimbas and other tuned percussion. Linsey's innovative use of found objects has made his brand of world music more accessible, with particular appeal for kids. Rubber gloves, carrots, watering cans, chairs, brooms, bins — all have been adapted to make music. New technology plays a part too.

Consistent with Linsey's generous and open musical approach, the program is richly illustrated with a wide range of his creative music. In one of these works, Qwerty, Linsey worked alongside singer Terri Delaney and composer Peter Rowe, a song writer who cannot communicate by speech. As Peter composed lyrics using a board with letters and numbers, Terri sang the words that Peter wrote in response to the music that Linsey was creating.

An audio-visual portrait of Linsey Pollak, musician of invention and artistry Image by Marniek Videos courtesy of Linsey Pollak Digital story by Hamish Sewell and Russell Stapleton [Dur: 4'56" 26.1MB]

Supporting Information

Linsey Pollak: I don't believe it! Jess has used up all the carrots.

Man: Oh, has she?

Linsey Pollak: I assume so, I'm sure there...

Man: I've got one...

Linsey Pollak: Have you?

Man: I've got some carrots. I bought some today.

Linsey Pollak: Oh, big ones?

Man: Um, I'll go and have a look.

Linsey Pollak: OK.

Linsey Pollak [excerpts from program with music and effects]: Music is one of those great things where it's open to all of us and it's actually a lot easier than most people think... I'm cutting off one end of a carrot... It involves instrument making; it involves performing; it involves improvising, humour, theatre. So it's all of the things that I love.

So normally the hair is on the inside... It was a whole inflated cow on its back... This'll be the tricky bit... Oh, it's going to work... Flutes made out of aluminium camping stools... This is probably the thinnest carrot that I've used.

Linsey Pollak: So this is my workshop, in which I do a multitude of different, mostly instrument-making projects. So it's under our house. We moved into an old Queenslander 16 years ago, just outside the little town of Kin Kin, which is in the Sunshine Coast hinterland about 45 minutes inland from Noosa.

Hamish Sewell: Look at all the things you've got!

Linsey Pollak: Well, yeah, I guess it's a workshop that has basically built up over a period of 35 years now.

Hamish Sewell: What are you doing with the wood over here?

Linsey Pollak: That's gidgee: it's a pile of gidgee that I now got some time ago, around about 20 years ago, and it's an absolutely beautiful western Queensland desert timber—it's an acacia, acacia cambagei—and it's really about my favourite wood for turning wind instruments. And that's sort of my timber of preference for making things ranging from the clarinis—the single-reed instruments I make—from the saxillos, which is a kind of wooden saxophone, and also flutes.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: I was trained as a wind player, so I studied clarinet and then later, much later on, saxophone became my main instrument. And I play flutes and I play kind of different types of bagpipes and I play a few double-reed instruments. So I'm really a wind player and a wind instrument maker, but over the years also I've become very interested in percussion and particularly tuned percussion and marimbas as also a really great way of getting people into making their own music.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: How I first started was with bamboo. And I was about 19 at the time and living in Sydney and travelled out to a community on a place called Glenfield Farm. It's all built up now, but in those days it was still rural—we're sort of looking at round about 1970. And at that time just next door to the farm that I was visiting was this stand of bamboo and I sort of thought, 'Wow, it would be really cool to try and make a flute.' So I hunted through various books and managed to get some measurements of old baroque flutes and use those measurements to experiment making flutes out of bamboo. And I actually have kept all these years—over the last 35 years—I've still got the very, very first bamboo flute that I made.

Hamish Sewell: Do you want to play it?

Linsey Pollak: Yeah, sure. [Plays the bamboo flute]

So I call that a tenor flute. It's basically the same sort of pitch as a western concert flute. I actually started then making flutes and selling them. I was... I went to uni for a while. I thought I was going to be a neurophysiologist and I was doing a science degree, which I sort of ended up dropping out of. Sydney uni, I would just actually sit on the ground outside Fisher Library with my wares out in front of me and literally sold from there. And then from word of mouth, people would get in touch with me to keep making instruments.

I was just interested in the brain and how the brain functioned. My life took a very different turn, as it turned out.

[Music performance and applause]

Linsey Pollak [to audience]: OK, maybe you can understand better now. This is sort of in a way a little bit more like a 'show and tell'. It's me talking about some of my favourite instruments and favourite materials for making instruments. And it's really a little journey about inventing musical instruments, and particularly wind instruments—hence the word 'passing wind'. So it's all about wind and vibration and I've got a sort of a through line, which starts with the humble balloon.

[Sound of air leaking out of balloon and children laughing]

That's a great laugh!

[More balloon noises and laughter]

And so now I'm going to put the neck of the balloon just on a bit of garden hose...

Linsey Pollak: One of the main things that I really got into with instrument making is making instruments out of very commonly found materials that you can just get in hardware stores. So this is an identical pitched flute, but this is just made out of irrigation pipe, just a bit of half-inch poly pipe. But it's sort of a little bit stronger and a bit more strident... Well, I'll walk right to the other side of the workshop and play it from over there. [Plays the flute]

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: What happened, in terms of my journey with this, was that I stopped studying science and decided to make instruments and I actually applied for an Australia Council grant to go then and study... well not study, but to measure musical instruments in museums in collections in Europe. I managed to get into about a dozen different collections and into the vaults where a lot of the instruments that weren't on display were and measured a lot of those instruments, because I was getting interested in early music, renaissance and medieval music. I'd at that stage become a bit disillusioned with the repertoire for the classical clarinet. So I worked for around about six months just travelling to different museums on the continent and then across to London to work in the Horniman Museum, or to measure some instruments there in London.

And so I ended up setting up a workshop in Rotherhide. It was a collective of craftspeople, about 20 craftspeople doing everything from sort of silkscreen, printing, to knitting, to glassblowing, to pottery, to violin bow makers, to guitar makers.

Linsey Pollak [to audience]: And what I'm going to do now is instead of use rubber glove or balloon, I'm going to use just ordinary old garbage bag. So I'm going to tape the garbage bag over the top and that's what now is going to vibrate. When I blow in the side, air is now going to go under that garbage bag and so this is going to vibrate. And because it's not so flexible, I've got a little bit more control over the pitch. So it sounds like this. [Plays the instrument]

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: Just before leaving to go on that trip I'd fallen in love with Macedonian bagpipes, the gajda: it was an absolute love affair. I heard them on an album of a friend and luckily in London came in contact with a group, a dance group, who not only were dancing to the music but there were a group of musicians who were playing traditional Macedonian music and through them made some contacts. And I ended up then going and staying in Macedonia for about seven months during that two-year period and basically discovered my passion for Macedonian and Eastern European music.

Hamish Sewell: So what are you doing here?

Linsey Pollak: Well, I'm just putting the gajda together. So it's a whole goatskin, as you can see; you can still see the front two legs. The chanter, the melody pipe, is coming out of the neck and in the left foreleg, the drone, which I'm putting together now, and then the blowpipe in the other foreleg. And it's ready to go.

Hamish Sewell: You can really see the goat there, can't you?

Linsey Pollak: You can, totally, yeah. So normally the hair is on the inside, though some makers use it on the outside. I prefer it on the outside. This one is a particularly pretty one; it was a wild goat from Percy Island off the coast of Mackay.

[Music from the instrument]

Linsey Pollak: Traditionally it would normally just be played with a tapan, or the drum. And then in more recent years there was a radio orchestra, the Skopje Radio Orchestra, and from that then in the villages they started then combining the instruments. But traditionally it would be the gajda—the bagpipe—and the tapan—the drum—that would be used for all of the various village ceremonies and parties. So for weddings, for christenings, circumcisions, various saints' days, that would be the traditional Macedonian sound.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: The gajda, or Macedonian bagpipe, actually became my real focal point for study and so I started making Macedonian bagpipes as well.

Hamish Sewell: And you were able to sell these and support yourself?

Linsey Pollak: Yeah, I was. Well, the bread and butter was the renaissance flutes at that time. And then that was in those days we were... living was very cheap. The price of a bus from Macedonia to London was 25 quid in those days, so it wasn't a big deal.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: I met a group of people that were into Macedonian and Bulgarian music, but particularly Macedonian. That group then nurtured my growing obsession with Macedonian music. And with one of those musicians, with Adam—Adam Heilbrun—he and I ended up travelling to Europe and across to Macedonia. We got in an old kombi which we bought, it broke down just near Stip on the Yugoslav coast and we had to leave it there, continued the journey by bus, ended up in Skopje, and just by absolute chance managed to find Lazo Nikolovski, who became my bagpipe teacher. He had a granny flat for rent, so we lived out the back in the granny flat. He was at that point a retired policeman, he'd retired early, he was only 55 at that stage.

And after breakfast, Lazo would usually amble over pretty early and we'd have a coffee and he actually, I think, got inspired to play a lot more of the gajda while we were there.

[Music]

I think for him it was a pretty new experience, the whole idea that somebody would be interested—he'd never been a teacher. He actually ended up... I brought him to Australia when I returned to Australia and we ended up touring and recording an album. And that was all very, very, very exciting for me; it was really the beginning of opening up a whole new world, I guess.

Linsey Pollak [to audience]: [Applause] So this is the Australian kitchen glove bagpipe. There are actually around about 235 different types of bagpipes around the world, but the most recent one, as far as I know... except I did get an email yesterday from somebody in France, who said, 'You've got some competition,' and directed me to a link on YouTube, where it was a whole inflated cow on its back with six drones coming out the neck and chanters in each of the legs... but anyway, that might be a bit more recent than this one. It was dead, yeah. Anyway this is the Australian kitchen glove bagpipe.

[Music and laughter]

Linsey Pollak: Soon after I got back, pretty broke from my time in Europe, I was busking outside the Hoyts cinema complex in Sydney, in George Street, with the gajda. And of course it's all pretty weird to most people. Then one of the movies came out—it must have been about 10.30 or something—and suddenly all these really tough-looking guys started making a beeline for me and I thought, 'Oh, what's going on here?' And within a few seconds they formed this circle around me and started dancing. They were all Macedonian guys; there must have been about 15 of them and here we were in George Street in Sydney.

And I'd got back to Australia thinking, 'OK, well I've got this minimal grasp of a new language that I'll probably never use over here, this music that probably no one will understand or be interested in,' and that night just blew all of those expectations apart. I went, 'OK.' And so talking to those guys, I realised that there was a very strong and vibrant Macedonian community in Sydney—of course in Melbourne too, and Wollongong—and that was the beginning of a real journey for me, just realising what an important place still in those communities this music had.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: In the summer of '82—so it's a long time ago now, 27 years ago—a park in Newtown, just off Church Street. All through that summer for about three months, we would have a minimum of two to three hundred people every Sunday afternoon, bringing picnics, barbeques, and a mixture of Macedonian and non-Macedonian. It was amazing. And all of these old guys coming out of the woodwork who hadn't played the gajda for years and years and years because basically they didn't have one anymore and also they just felt that no one was interested. Their families discouraged them from playing it 'cos it was thought of as pretty uncool, not having anything to do with Australian society.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: I always would look through the Trading Post. And I was just looking through, and it was an old copy of the Trading Post, and at the top of the list was 'ancient Hungarian shepherd's woodwind instrument'. And I went, 'Oh?' Anyway, I rang the number and someone answered, just 'Yeeees?' And I said, 'Oh, I 'm just ringing up about the advertisement,' (I was quite nervous), 'for the ancient Hungarian shepherd's wood instrument?' 'Yeeees?' 'It's not a tarogato is it?' 'Yeeees.'

Now I'm getting really excited, but I also was aware that there's another type of more traditional tarogato which is just like a very simple shawm with a double reed. I said, 'Is this a single reed, like a soprano saxophone?' 'Yeeees.' 'Is it still for sale?' 'Yeeees.' 'Could I see it today?' 'Yeeees.'

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: She lived in Kings Cross, just above a gay bar, and so I went in there and she came down. She was an old Hungarian woman, carrying this case, and we introduced and we sat down at one of the tables and pulled it out. And she said, 'Play it.' So I played it and it was just beautiful. And then she said, 'Oh no, I don't think I can sell.' And I went, 'OK, fair enough,' you know, but I was sort of so disappointed. And I said, 'Well, could I just play it one more time?' and she said, 'Yeeees.' So I played it one more time and she said, 'You play very beautiful. I sell to you.'

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: This is made by actually one of probably the most famous of the makers, called Stowasser.

Hamish Sewell: It looks like a clarinet, doesn't it?

Linsey Pollak: Ah, looks like a clarinet, but if you can see, it's got that very conical look whereas the clarinet is cylindrical. So this is more like a soprano sax. [Plays]

I wanted to make an instrument that was basically like the tarogato, but was much simpler and cheaper to make and much easier. And also I don't make keys, I work with wood. And so I wanted to design an instrument which I initially called a tarogatino—a little tarogato. And that tarogatino I started working on in the late '80s, in '86, '87, and since that time I've just been developing and that, that's probably a bit over 15 years ago now I changed the name to saxillo. So this is an earlier model, probably from about 10 years ago. [Plays]

I've just cleaned out my workshop over the last few days and as I did so I discovered many half-finished projects and I discovered actually a very beautiful little high pitched saxillo that I've made just out of a watering can, and that had a beautiful conical neck that looked as though it would be just the right size. You can see it's actually got holes drilled in the wrong places, with bits of electrical tape covering them and I've just got a little soparino saxa mouthpiece on the top of it. It's quite strident, this one. [Plays]

[Music]

I guess my hobbyhorse is that we live in a society where music's been industrialised; it's become a consumer item. I don't come across anyone for whom music is not important, but for most people nowadays that music is a commodity, it's something they consume—it might be a concert, it might be a CD, it might be being plugged into an iPod. And music is one of those great things where it's open to all of us and it's actually a lot easier than most people think.

[Music and sound effects]

Hamish Sewell: Could you talk about why you're using looping, when you started using looping, just to give us a bit of background?

Linsey Pollak: If somebody's not familiar with looping, what that means is that it's a foot pedal set up, a piece of equipment that, say, a guitarist would use. And you play something through the looper and using your feet to switch it in and out of record mode, you can record a phrase that you play and then that immediately plays back, then you can add that. I'll use it in its most basic and simple form to start off, so all I'm going to do is just record a drone and then play over the drone. [Plays using looping]

Linsey Pollak: The very first time I started using looping was when I moved away from the city and moved up onto the Sunshine Coast—or originally I was up near Gympie. And I didn't have a whole range of musicians that I had in Sydney to play with, so all of my solo shows used that live looping as a means for being able to build up more complex and more interesting sounds when you're just one person.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: A whole journey that I've gone on over recent years is instruments that I call clarini, or clarinis for the plural. So they're just basically simple clarinets. I mean, the beauty of a clarinet-type instrument is you can make it out of just any bit of tubing that's got the right dimensions. So this one is a very small one and it literally is just a piece of agricultural pipe with seven finger holes and a thumbhole and using an alto sax mouthpiece. [Plays]

Linsey Pollak [to audience]: [Applause] So still in the clarinet family, I'm going to introduce now one of my favourite instruments. This is Mr Curly. This is Mr Curly and Mr Curly is actually a contrabass clarinet. This coiled garden hose is about two metres long and so it puts it in the pitch of a contrabass clarinet. It sounds like this. [Plays]

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: This one's called Shirley, and Shirley is a slightly larger version of Mrs Curly. So both Shirley and Mrs Curly are made in glass tube. And it's a glass spiral, so once again you stretch it out and it's over two metres long. Making a very tight coil, it brings the finger holes quite close together. Now, Shirley is even deeper in pitch than Mr Curly.

Hamish Sewell: The names that you attribute to your instruments, is there any sort of logic behind that? I mean, not that there should be, but there seems to be a lot of sort of affection and endearment here.

Linsey Pollak: Yeah, well there is affection and endearment and I guess the logic is the same as why is my name Linsey and your name Hamish, I guess. Shirley actually got her name because, being a very sort of bass or bass-y instrument, so it was sort of Shirley, her full name is 'Shirley Bass-y'. And Mr Curly looks like Mr Curly and Mrs Curly looks like Mrs Curly.

Hamish Sewell: Mm. This looks almost like you're assembling a gun here.

Linsey Pollak: So this is Raven. I've made this out of two blocks of wood, or one block of wood [that's] been split in half, and then a convoluted bore which has been routed out and then put back together again. So again the instrument is much longer acoustically than it actually looks. And it sounds like this. [Plays]

So again I was using a little microphone, so Raven was working as an electro-acoustic instrument then. And so I can also play Raven or any of those other instruments with different effects if I want. And so, I mean there's a piece that I've recorded called 'Raven talks', which is quite a funky sort of electronic dance piece where Raven sounds quite different to the piece that I piece that I just played then.

[Music]

Hamish Sewell: Tell me a little bit about the idea of collaboration and spontaneity within music.

Linsey Pollak: I'm sort of known for my solo shows and yet I really, something that's really a passion for me also is collaboration. And a lot of those collaborations involve improvisation and the creation of spontaneous music.

Radio announcer [archival]: Stand by now for a paranormal experience. [ABC news theme played on wind instrument] The Paranormal Music Society, three members of whom have just joined me in the studio. And I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves, because they are an interesting collection of gentlemen.

Denis Bland (Linsey) [archival]: Well I think, Andrew, I should take over proceedings as secretary of the Paranormal Music Society. And I think first of all I should introduce the professor, who's our illustrious president. Professor Crivici

Linsey Pollak: We formed the Paranormal Music Society—so that was in the early 80s. And I guess what I brought into the Paranormal Music Society was bringing some pretty unusual instruments in there and starting to experiment with some hybrid designs. And we used to channel the spirits of dead composers.

Radio announcer [archival]: Actually, I might make a special request too. I'm about to lose my producer for this year...

Denis Bland (Linsey) [archival]: So what's the overwhelming emotion, Andrew, is it sadness, do you think?

Radio announcer [archival]: Oh it is sadness, but also hope.

Denis Bland (Linsey) [archival]: OK, well it'll have to be a quick one. Sadness yet hope.

Radio announcer [archival]: Well wishing her a good time, you know?

[Music]

Linsey Pollak: And it was the first time where I sort of started bringing carrots into performances that I was doing, and instruments like flutes made out of aluminium camping stools and aluminium chairs. And I used, you know, a kitchen sink and a whole lot of kitchen paraphernalia. And although we did a lot of other things in the paranormals, that was a vehicle for me to be able to start bringing in a few lateral and hybrid designs that I was starting to experiment with.

[Music]

I've collaborated with a great percussionist, Tunji Beier, over the past 12, 13 years. I've collaborated in the group QWERTY with Terri Delaney and Peter Rowe, and that was a very, very intense collaboration over a period of about three years: we would walk onstage having no concept at all what we were going to play.

[Excerpt from performance by QWERTY: 'Hi. We're QWERTY and I'm Peter Rowe and we are using facilitated communication to talk.']

Peter, who is the wordsmith, would improvise the words. He actually can't talk due to his autism and Down Syndrome. He's tapping out the words on a board, like a keyboard, Terri's reading the words and then singing them to the music that I'm creating. So it was absolutely pure and spontaneous improvisation.

[Excerpt from performance by QWERTY: 'Yes, folks, we have no idea what we are doing or going to do.']

[Music]

Terri Delaney: I'm Terri Delaney and my role within the trio, I guess, was like a bridge between the music and the lyrics. [Singing] Because I was able to facilitate Peter at a fast speed, it did mean that songs could get written in the moment. And it was an incredible experience 'cos it was kind of like being jacked in. When we were performing, for the three of us it was like entering a completely other zone.

[Music]

Peter didn't start to communicate with the outside world until he was in his 30s. People would be watching us, and people would actually say that they didn't believe it was happening in the moment, which completely fascinated us, because why the hell would you do it? 'Cos I'm listening to the music and I'm watching these letters being spelt out into words and I'm putting them to music, all in the moment.

[Music]

[Audience laughter and applause]

Linsey Pollak: This'll be tricky with this carrot because it's a very small carrot, so whether it...

Hamish Sewell: Hmm, whether we can carry it off...

Linsey Pollak: Whether we can carrot it off...

Well, yeah, in terms of, yeah, at one point I sort of, I guess I got a bit sick of just being called 'the carrot man' and, 'Oh, that's the guy who does the carrot thing.'

[Sound effects]

For a couple of years I didn't do any stuff with carrots. I had a show for a few years called 'The art of food', which really featured carrots in a big way. And I guess I could have kept doing that till I died really.

Linsey Pollak [to audience]: I hope this works... [laughter]... I normally have a spare, but Romano put the spare one in the salad yesterday... [laughter]...

Linsey Pollak: I mean, I like them, I love them, but I don't cook so much with them.

Linsey Pollak: But, yeah, I just didn't want to get I guess branded with just that mark of being the carrot man. However, at this point, it is a really fantastic tool in the sense of getting, pulling people into the whole style of music that I do, or the approach of getting people involved in making their own instruments or making their own music.

Linsey Pollak: So, what we have is an alto sax mouthpiece, a carrot with a 12-millimetre hole, and six finger holes.

[Music]

Hamish Sewell: It strikes me that if someone separates themselves from the word 'carrot' and actually listens to the sounds, than that transports them to where a music takes them.

Linsey Pollak: Yeah, I mean we could have actually tricked this radio audience and we could have—when I did the carrot then I played it—I mean they don't know that it was a carrot, they're just taking our word for it.

Hamish Sewell: But the discerning carrot-listener would not be fooled.

Linsey Pollak: I dunno, I dunno. I don't know whether I would necessarily be able, if visually I couldn't see the carrot and somebody played that, I wouldn't know that it was... I would have no idea it was on a carrot.

[Music]

Linsey Pollak [to audience]: [Applause] Thank you. Thanks for being a great audience. I'm going to finish off just with one more piece. Might just get Mr Curly and Carrot just doing a little bit of a groove. [Music]